Santa Fe train 76 and 17 tons of sand

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Santa Fe PA No. 61, whose long nose may have saved its crew 14 years later, in 1951 flies green flags on the point of First 24, the Grand Canyon, at Caliente, Calif. Stan Kistler On December 22, 1965, I was the engineer on Santa Fe Railway Los Angeles–San Diego train 76, one of the […]

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Chessie 8272 comes home NEWSWIRE

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Chessie System-painted C&O No. 8272 poses in Building 10 at GE Transportation’s Lawrence Park, Pa., shops for a reunion picture with GE workers who were on site when the B30-7 locomotive was built — in 1980. Greg McDonnell LAWRENCE PARK, Pa. — It wasn’t supposed to happen. When the CSX shop in Huntingdon, W. Va., […]

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Boarding the cars at Guthrie

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Louisville & Nashville E8 No. 787 leads the head-end cars and lone coach of Evansville–St. Louis train 10 out of East St. Louis in May 1968.  R. R. Wallin, George W. Hamlin coll. “No, that train doesn’t stop here. You’ll have to go up to ‘Hoptown’ to get it,” was the less-than-helpful information from the […]

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Growing up along the Burlington

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An E unit leads a train through Berwyn, Ill., on a lazy day in August 1963. Such scenes were part of daily life along the Burlington’s triple-track main west of Chicago. Larry Kostka It didn’t matter how often you rode the trains, or even if you did at all. Growing up in the postwar era […]

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W. A. Eby, PRR engineman and foster dad

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Like many old steam men, PRR engineman W. A. Eby disliked diesels, but he manages a smile in the cab of S12 No. 8734 working the Bellefonte local in 1957. Michael Hauk collection I never knew Walter A. Eby, my dad’s foster father. He passed away in 1963, when I was two years old. I […]

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Chariots of fire on the Erie

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A hot-metal “bottle car,” one of three in an Erie train that included eight hopper cars as spacers, passes DeForest Junction, between Youngstown and Warren, Ohio, in 1966. Clifford A. Redanz One of the more interesting aspects of steel-mill railroading were the “hot-metal runs” that moved molten iron from the blast furnaces to the open […]

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Close encounters of the 4-6-4 kind

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Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo’s two ex-NYC J-1e’s were among the Hudsons that captivated a Buffalo boy in the late 1940s. Frank Clodfelter While growing up in Cleveland and Buffalo after World War II, a close encounter with a Hudson-type locomotive was just a train ride away. My first memory was as a four-year-old. My family […]

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